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The amount of data being created in the digital world has increased to such a level in the last few years that there is not, at present, enough capacity to store it all. This has put many organisations in a position where they have so much data they are struggling to manage it effectively. In …

Web Hosting UK Blog

To the extent that the costs for storage fall, companies hold a greater volume of information. However, in Big Data times, it is worth creating policies for data destruction. Many data are outdated and will never be accessed. They end … Continue reading →

Web Hosting UK Blog

Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider DigitalOcean is expanding its infrastructure through Telx data centers. The company has deployed servers in Telx’s SCL2 data center in Santa Clara, California.

The post DigitalOcean Expands to Silicon Valley Data Center by Telx appeared first on Web Hosting Talk.

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Linode is one of those technology success stories that start with Linux and a dream. The company started in 2003, three years before Amazon Web Services hit the scene, and was 100 percent bootstrapped. Now it’s an international hosting and cloud provider expanding into two new markets: Frankfurt and Singapore.

The post Cloud Firm Linode to Add Singapore, Germany Data Centers appeared first on Web Hosting Talk.

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Facebook and Indian telecom Reliance Communications collaborated on the launch, of Internet.org, which was announced on Tuesday.

The post Facebook Partners to Bring Free Data Access to India appeared first on Web Hosting Talk.

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Companies use affordable dedicated servers in Singapore for their data processing, networking, and ecommerce needs. The environment is secure and allows flexibility with software installation.
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With nearly 1.4 billion inhabitants, China leads the world in Internet traffic. It is also the second largest market for San Francisco-based CloudFlare. The online security and performance company has been working to build 12 new data centers within mainland China. The goal is to expand their global network and launch local service beginning in January 2015.

The Censorship Hurdle

Despite its sheer number of Internet users, China maintains one of the world’s strictest online censoring regimes. The Golden Shield Project of the 1990s led to a massive content control system that has since become known as The Great Firewall.

The Chinese government filters all data from outside of the country, and not just entire web sites. Authorities utilize technology that allows for the filtering of specific pages within a site as well as exact phrases that are typed into search engines. China blocks most major social networking sites and even deletes mircroblog posts that are considered to be a threat to social stability. Many American television shows are banned from online video platforms, and the government maintains tight control on what news broadcasts are released to the public.

Doing Business in China’s Data Space

Even though the United States is responsible for supplying much of the technology that China uses for Internet censoring, major companies like Yahoo and Google have struggled to enter the market. Google eventually resorted to creating a separate self-censored website for Chinese users in an effort to appease the local authorities.

In order to be successful, outside business owners must partner with a local entity that can help manage operations. More importantly, this ensures that all company practices are compliant with government policies. Amazon, for example, teamed up with ChinaNetCenter to establish a presence that led to the launch of their first China-based data center in 2013. CloudFlare is now doing the same thing, but with a different partner and on a much larger scale.

Despite being publicly criticized for giving in to China’s suppressive practices, executives of large outside corporations fully realize the benefit of accessing this data space. CloudFlare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince agrees that doing some business in China is far better than doing no business at all.

Prince does not intend to change China’s Internet policy. CloudFlare is not a host, so it does not have the ability to remove information from the Internet. Removing a customer from the network simply makes that website slower, not invisible.

CloudFlare’s Business Strategy

CloudFlare focuses on two main elements: speed and security. Most new-age host providers play up a wide range of services. While this is not a bad move, it does create some geographic limitations. With a more exclusive approach, CloudFlare is able to distribute customer data from six continents using Anycast technology. Visitors to participating websites enjoy faster speeds because they are routed to the closest data center within the company’s global network.

Furthermore, this network continues to innovate with each new member. It already sees more traffic than Wikipedia, Amazon, and Twitter combined. Being part of CloudFlare means optimizing your web content for any kind of device. The system reduces the load on your web server by storing static portions of your site. On average, network members double their load speeds and use 60% less bandwidth.

Websites on the CloudFlare network are also highly secured. They are protected from a wide range of threats, including SQL injections, spam, and DDoS attacks. This is critical for international sites, especially those with a presence in Asia. Better still, the core service is free and requires only a small alteration to your DNS.

Who is Using CloudFlare?

Online businesses are looking for security, performance or both. The latter is the key advantage. Companies are finding that performance enhancements often lead to new security risks. Likewise, many modern security solutions end up negatively impacting performance. CloudFlare address both of these issues simultaneously and has developed a product that caters to a wide range of users:

• Fortune 500 companies
• National governments
• Large and small ecommerce sites
• Seasonal sites
• Individual blogs

What Does China Mean for the CloudFlare Network? 

CloudFlare currently operates 30 data centers worldwide. Most of these are dotted throughout Europe and the United States. When customers began requesting faster speeds in China, the company started its three-year battle for approval to store data on the mainland.

Right now, Chinese customers and page visitors are still being routed through CloudFlare’s data center in Hong Kong. However, the 2015 launch is expected to make big changes worldwide. China-based companies will enjoy better performance, and network members outside the country will enjoy better access to their Chinese customers. Plus, even if content is blocked by the government, it will still remain accessible to any user outside of China.

The new data centers are also expected to significantly reduce the risk of security attacks on individual websites as well as on the network as a whole. Ironically, most of the severe attacks on CloudFlare’s network have actually originated in China. Local centers will be able to absorb these kinds of attacks from within before they make a global impact. As proof, CloudFlare confidently remains the sole supporter of Hong Kong’s online voting platform. This was the recent target of the largest DDoS attack in history.

Gaining Traction 

Several customers have been chosen to be a part of the beta launch this coming January. CloudFlare is also encouraging interested parties to act soon. For Chinese customers, you must obtain government approval before joining the network. Fortunately, CloudFlare and its partner are working to make the process as quick and streamlined as possible.

There is also talk of opening up a regional office in addition to the existing sales offices in Japan and Australia. Considering CloudFlare’s recent involvement with Hong Kong’s democracy movement, speculations are centering on the largest SAR city.

The Current Outlook 

With over 630 million Internet users, China is highly involved in online governance. Clearly, the country wants the United States to be involved, but will government authorities change the polices? That remains to be seen. For right now, CloudFlare customers can look forward to dramatic enhancements to their global network.

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Web Hosting Geeks’ Blog

It’s mind-blowing to think of how far IT technology has come since the PC first began to be marketed to a mass audience. It’s hard to fathom looking back just how we were able to get along without this technology that has now becomes so ingratiated into all aspects of our everyday lives. Yet the rise of computer technology certainly didn’t happen by accident; as is the case with all solution systems, this technology arose out of a demand to perform tasks more efficiently. To that end, the earliest products performed brilliantly, storing vast amounts of data and making it available for near-immediate retrieval.

Yet as is the case with most new technologies, once computer technology and its accompanying data storage potential was introduced, developers quickly went to work to improve it. Today’s users may think it laughable to contemplate a time when room-sized computers held only bytes of memory, particularly since in today’s world, discussions involving data storage are reaching both the terabyte and petabyte levels. Yet despite an emphasis on advancement, the earliest years of IT proliferation saw relatively slow steps taken to improve the efficiency of data storage devices. For almost 20 years, hard drive technology created by IBM has the workhorse of the data storage industry, and made possible the explosion in popularity of the PC. These earliest drives allowed for storage of up to 60 megabytes on a dual-disk hard drive.

The Advent of Portable Storage Technology

Yet this technology was not without its limitations. Enter Syed Iftikar and his accompanying contribution to the pantheon on data storage devices: the SyQuest drive. What set this technology apart from the others of its day was that it was the first to introduce the concept of removable storage. This offered a number of advantages over fixed drives, chief among them being the ability to expand storage capacity. The first SyQuest drive debuted in 1982 with a 6.38 megabyte storage capacity. By 1987, that capacity was up to 44.5 megabytes on a single removable cartridge drive.

While initially introduced to only the IBM-compatible market, SyQuest actually has Apple to thank for the skyrocketing in popularity that it experienced in the late 80’s. The desktop publishing revolution that began with Apple’s Macintosh line created new demands for greater data storage capacity to support the heavy use of graphics that users now demanded. The typical 80 megabyte capacities of the fixed drives of the day simply couldn’t keep up, and SyQuest drives soon became the data storage solution of choice in the industry.

1995: A Groundbreaking Year

Yet 1995 saw a new dawn in the IT market, when “multimedia” became all the craze in computer technology. Iomega was able to wrestle control of the data storage market away from SyQuest with a product that would revolutionize the storage solution world: the Zip drive. The Zip drive capitalized on the current desire that users had to have a single, easy-to-use storage device on which they could store their personal and business files, as well as their graphics, music, and videos. Originally offered with 100 megabyte storage capacities, the Zip disks would eventually grow to accommodate as many as 750.

Yet while the Zip drive took the portable data storage market by storm, its capacity paled in comparison to the digital video disk, which also first gained a foothold in the market in 1995. Rewritable DVD technologies such as DVD-RAM offered excellent data integrity and storage capacities that where among the first to get up into the gigabyte range. Even today, DVD-RAM technology continues to be utilized in many computers and personal video recorders such as camcorders.

Today’s Data Storage Technologies

Yet in terms of user-friendliness and insane amounts of data storage, few previous technologies could compete with what Trek Technology would unleash upon the world in the year 2000. Compatible with the USB ports on all computers and only about the size of the typical human thumb, flash drives (or USB or thumb drives, as they’re also known) soon became the standard for data storage devices. Due to the ease of portability that they allow for and innovative design options available to manufacturers, flash drives remain a popular choice with users today. Current products can hold up to 16 gigabytes. Yet many of the same features that make flash drives so appealing can also present challenges to users. Because they’re so small, they’re easily lost or misplaced. Transit agencies and laundry companies report finding hundreds of thousands of flash drives left on trains and in cabs or in pants pockets every year.

The evolution of data storage took a new turn in 2006 when Amazon Web Services began offering a collection of remote computing services that quickly became known as the cloud computing platform. Rather than using a local server to process, manage, and store data, cloud computing uses a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet. After Amazon launched AWS, other software companies soon followed with cloud platforms of their own, such as Microsoft Azure and Google Drive. Today, it’s estimated that the Cloud currently holds more than 1 Exabyte of data.

The Evolving Costs of Data Storage

In the case of most technological revolutions, new technologies command top dollar when first introduced, yet tend to regress to lower prices over times as that technology becomes more readily available to a much broader customer base. The same concept has held true for data storage technologies. In the early days of the industry’s evolution, storing large amounts of data came with a hefty price tag, as it’s estimated that average storage cost per gigabyte was as high as $ 437,500 in 1980. Yet according to the research site Statistic Brain, this is how those costs have trended since:

• 1985: $ 105,000/Gig
• 1990: $ 11,200/Gig
• 1995: $ 1,120/Gig
• 2000: $ 11/Gig
• 2005: $ 1.24/Gig
• 2010: $ 0.09/Gig
• 2014: $ 0.03/Gig

Looking back throughout the history of data storage devices gives us the perfect example of technology at work, with needs being identified and products being developed to fill those needs. Yet as technological history has shown us, innovators are constantly looking to build a better mousetrap. Not only is this evident from looking at the progression of data storage devices and their capabilities over the last 20 years, but it makes one wonder of what the future of data storage will be. Developers have already taken basketball-sized disks and drives and been able to drastically reduce them in size while also dramatically increasing their storage capacity. As we move forward, the question on everyone’s mind undoubtedly will be how much more efficient data storage technology can get.

Web Hosting Geeks’ Blog

For some businesses the burden of having an in-house service provider or IT department may be too much for the budget so a third party option needs to be considered.
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